{"id":2982,"date":"2007-08-06T13:31:07","date_gmt":"2007-08-06T13:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2982"},"modified":"2007-08-06T13:31:07","modified_gmt":"2007-08-06T13:31:07","slug":"waiting_for_my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2982","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for My Air Taxi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.jonudell.net\/2007\/08\/06\/waiting-for-my-air-taxi\/\">Jon Udell<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>One powerful force that\u2019s dispersing economic opportunity is of course the Interent. A decade ago there were a few lucky souls who could pull an income through a modem. Today there are lots more, and we\u2019ve yet to see what may happen once high-bandwidth telepresence finally gets going.<br \/>\nBut a second force for dispersion has yet to kick in at all. It is the Internetization of transportation \u2014 and specifically, of air travel. That\u2019s where Esther Dyson comes in. She\u2019s investing in several of the companies that are aiming to reinvent air travel in the ways described by James Fallows in his seminal book on this topic, Free Flight. In that vision of a possible future, a fleet of air taxis takes small groups of passengers directly from point to point, bypassing the dozen or so congested hubs and reactivating the thousands of small airports \u2014 some near big cities, many elsewhere.<br \/>\nThere are two key technological enablers. First a new fleet of small planes that are lighter, faster, smarter, safer, and more fuel-efficient than the current fleet of general aviation craft with their decades-old designs.<br \/>\nThe second enabler is the Internet\u2019s ability to make demand visible, and to aggregate that demand. So, for example, I\u2019m traveling today from Keene, NH to Aspen, CO. If there are a handful of fellow travelers wanting to go between those two endpoints \u2014 or between, say, 40-mile-radius circles surrounding them, which circles might contain several small airports \u2014 we\u2019d use the Internet to rendezvous with one another and with an air taxi.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jon Udell: One powerful force that\u2019s dispersing economic opportunity is of course the Interent. A decade ago there were a few lucky souls who could pull an income through a modem. Today there are lots more, and we\u2019ve yet to see what may happen once high-bandwidth telepresence finally gets going. But a second force for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,22,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2982"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}